Santiago Suchilquitongo

Santiago Suchilquitongo is a town at about 1,665 m in the northern Etla valley, around 30 km northwest of Oaxaca city on Federal Highway 190. It had 8,273 inhabitants in 2020. The town takes its patron from Saint James the Greater, and its Nahuatl name is usually translated as "among the flowering quelites", the wild greens still eaten across Oaxaca.

The town is best known for Huijazoo, the Zapotec ceremonial centre on the hill north of town that locals call Cerro de la Campana, after a legend of a golden bell buried inside it. The site sits about 150 m above the valley floor and has eight buildings more than 4 m high. In 1985 archaeologists found Tomb 5 there, a burial chamber more than 6 m deep whose walls keep over 40 square metres of mural painting, with around sixty painted figures, carved door jambs showing pairs of jaguar-lineage nobles, two stucco masks and painted glyphs. INAH dates the pottery from the burial to around AD 550, in the time of Monte Albán, and specialists describe Huijazoo as the seat of power that for several centuries held together the Zapotec towns of the northern Etla valley. In 2025 a second intact painted tomb, Tomb 10, was found on the same hill on the San Pablo Huitzo side.

Tomb 5 is closed to the public because its paintings are fragile, and the hilltop has no visitor services yet. In January 2026 INAH and the federal Culture Secretary inspected a visitor centre under construction at the tomb. Until it opens, the way to see Tomb 5 is through the Museo Comunitario Cerro de la Campana in the centre of Suchilquitongo, which displays a replica of the tomb along with original pieces from the site.